Draft, August 2014
Tolerance and Power: What Can a Tolerant Society Do?
Among the many trends in new theories of tolerance by
thinkers such as Wendy Brown (2006), Rainer Forst (2013),
Michael Walzer (1999), and Slavoj Žižek (2008), the most
interesting one concerns the link between the study of power
and the kind of socio-political relationships that a
“tolerant” society enables through its commitment to norms
of democracy, in particular with regard to inclusion and
pluralism. Most evident among those who are critical of
tolerance—but also present in various efforts to establish
tolerance as a cardinal virtue of democratic deliberation—
discussions of the links between tolerance and power have
produced several important new insights. On the one hand,
the discussions have tempered the tendency to see tolerance
as an unqualified good for democracy and in so doing
clarified how and why it is that a tolerant society must
actively resist its own sense of superiority in order to
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produce socio-political relationships that do not replace
norms of inclusion and pluralism with policies of exclusion
and sameness. On the other hand, the discussions have also
demonstrated how difficult the identification of this rather
unique mode of resistance can be and why this may be due to
an unfortunate tendency (implicit if not explicit) within
new theories of tolerance to see power as a phenomenon or
structure that is external to tolerance itself. My objective
in this essay is to critically examine the latter of these
two aspects and to suggest that a new approach to tolerance
and power might be needed. In what way and for what reasons
do new theories of tolerance see power as external to
tolerance? What are the limitations of this perspective? And
how might we develop an alternative approach to the link
between tolerance and power, one that recognizes that power
indeed never is external to the ideals and practices of
tolerance?
To get some traction on these questions, let us begin
by appreciating how new theories of tolerance by thinkers
such as Brown, Forst, Walzer, and Žižek have introduced
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various elements of the critical tradition broadly conceived
in order to improved upon the conception of tolerance and
power suggested to us by classical liberalism. According to
the latter, the relationship between tolerance and power is
best conceptualized as an issue of delimitation according to
which the aim of tolerance is to limit the exercise of power
in order to prevent States and individuals from persecuting
beliefs and traditions that offend what they think is good
for themselves and/or society more broadly understood. The
new theories of tolerance do not necessarily disagree with
this way of framing the issue. Still, they all suggest, each
in its own way, that liberalism’s strictly negative view
must be supplemented by a more nuanced approach, one in
which tolerance not only limits power but also serves the
desires and ambitions of the powerful in ways that can be
more or less repressive, more or less emancipatory. Brown,
Forst, Walzer, and Žižek all agree that this supplementation
is needed in order to better capture how tolerance works in
a neoliberal context in which power is reinforced through
diffuse networks of discipline and surveillance rather than
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through centralized structures of hierarchy and authority.
They do not agree, however, on what follows from this shift
with regard to the politics of tolerance. According to one
view, the supplementation of classical liberalism thus
allows us to see how tolerance can be understood as a
“demand of reason” that supports the right use of power by
infusing it with universal principles of equality and
respect (Forst, 2003, especially 72–73; see also Walzer,
1999, 83–93). According to another view, this infusion
ignores how those in power often use tolerance to frame
inequality as a fact of pluralism, something that shores up
rather than interrupts structures of injustice and exclusion
(Brown, 2006, 25; Žižek 2008, 663). Without it necessarily
being so, tolerance may thus legitimize a political order in
which acceptance of repressive inequality is substituted for
a critique of its conditions of possibility.
Keeping these internal disagreements in mind, we may
map the contributions generated by new theories of tolerance
by way of a simple matrix, which proceeds along two axes
organized around (1) the repressive and non-repressive
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effects of tolerance and (2) tolerance’s relation to power
as either limiting or serving someone or something other
than itself.1 The bottom-half of the matrix captures the
disagreements that exist among classical liberal conceptions
of tolerance; the top-half outlines to the main differences
dividing the new theories of tolerance. The matrix itself
looks like this:
[Insert figure 1 around here]
The matrix is revealing in a number of different ways.
Perhaps most obvious is how it presents new theories of
tolerance as an internally divided mirror image of classical
liberalism, something that deserves more attention than it
has received heretofore. This is especially the case because
attention to this side of the debate will allow us to
underscore how new theories of tolerance are reluctant to
see the practice of tolerance as a power in its own right,
and how they instead treat it as determined by forces that
are located outside the purview of tolerance itself—be it by
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way of reason as a transcendental category applicable to all
modes of thought and action, or by way of neoliberalism as
the most important regime of modern governmentality. As
already indicated, there are good reasons for
conceptualizing tolerance and power in this manner,
especially given the complex context in which contemporary
practices of tolerance operate. But it also raises serious
questions about whether new theories of tolerance by
thinkers such as Brown, Forst, Walzer, and Žižek have
misconstrued their object of study, and whether they in that
sense have missed out on important aspects of what a
tolerant society can do in terms of fostering socio-
political relationships that affirm (even nourish)
democracy’s norms of inclusion and pluralism. Formulated as
a series of questions, we might thus ask the following: if
we accept the idea that tolerance obtains its power from
something external to itself, then how do we sustain
tolerance’s integrity as a concept and how do we avoid
reducing it to a name for something else? Moreover, if an
important aspect of tolerance remains its delimiting
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character vis-à-vis the powers that-be, how do we
conceptualize the processes underpinning this delimitation?
Do these processes not suggest a power of their own? If so,
how is this power related to the other powers that define
modern tolerance, and how do we conceptualize the
reverberations and dissonances that arise from the ensuing
interplay between the different powers involved in becoming
tolerant?
The emphasis on the external relationship between
tolerance and power makes it difficult for new theories of
tolerance to address these questions, and we might thus say
that one of the most important challenges for thinking about
what a tolerant society can do, remains how to conceptualize
the very power of acting tolerantly. One way to address this
challenge—one that I explore in Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to
Politics—is to switch our analytical focus from an external to
an internal perspective, approaching tolerance as a lived
experience prompted by the tension between objecting to
someone or something while at the same time accepting its
presence as a legitimate part of society.2 The primary
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objective of such a switch in perspective is not to
determine whether the reasons for objection and acceptance
are normatively justifiable according to some universal
procedure or value but rather to examine what a tolerating
subject can do in the face of something that—often for very
different reasons—feels more or less objectionable, more or
less painful.3 To bring this aspect to the forefront of the
discussion, the internal perspective advocated here
introduces the idea of a force field as that which
facilitates the agency and orientation necessary for both
the tolerator and the tolerated to move in this or that
direction. As I have argued elsewhere, a unique feature of
the force field specific to tolerance is the emphasis it
puts on the sensorial dimensions political life, in
particular as these dimensions concern registers of affect
and perception (see Tønder, 2013, 81). Building off these
registers, the switch from an external to an internal
perspective thus suggests that the power of acting
tolerantly hinges on the range of affects and perceptions
that we find within the force field of tolerance, as well as
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on how each of them either intensities or relaxes the
intensities and thresholds that sustain the endurance of
some but not other experiences of pain and objection. To be
tolerant, in other words, is not simply an issue of re-
acting to forces imposed externally onto the practice of
tolerance; in addition, and I would suggest more
importantly, the process of becoming tolerant also involves
forces that are unique to tolerance itself and that
introduce an irreducible variance in how other powers work
in relation to norms of inclusion and pluralism.
Another way of saying this is to point out that at the
same time as the internal perspective agrees that the ideal
of tolerance should be inclusion and pluralism, the
perspective also suggests that the affirmation of this ideal
hinges less on external forces and more on the affective and
perceptual experiences that give citizens the power to be
resilient, and that enable them to actively engage with many
of the qualities that are embedded in the norms of inclusion
and pluralism, including contestation, disagreement, and
renegotiation of authority and privilege. The advantage of
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formulating the ideal and practice of tolerance in these
terms is that it links practices of tolerance to what they
are a response to (i.e., experiences of pain and objection),
and that it in this sense gives us better traction on how to
conceptualize the motivation for becoming tolerant in the
first place. Moreover, the shift from an external to an
internal perspective changes how we conceptualize the
problem of power, something that gives us a better and more
flexible understanding of what a tolerant society can do. If
a tolerant society affirms norms of inclusion and pluralism,
it is not exclusively or primarily because citizens “hold
back” in order to serve something higher than their own
needs and interests. Rather, the drive to become tolerant
arises from within tolerance itself and it points to the
possibility of enriching the lives of citizens though
inclusion and pluralism, augmenting the number of encounters
they can experience across cultures, religions, and
traditions. What a tolerant society does at its noblest is
to enable this augmentation through practices of endurance
and resilience.
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An important task for thinking about the link between
tolerance and power in these alternative terms is to show
how it helps us to reframe the suspicion in post-Marxist
critical theory that tolerance has become a tool for framing
inequality as a fact of pluralism, which shores up rather
than interrupts structures of exclusion and injustice. A
first step in this regard is to acknowledge that although
they currently seem to overlap, the histories of tolerance
and neoliberalism have never been identical; indeed the two
histories have often been in opposition to each other, with
tolerance supporting the causes of groups and individuals
who have sought to undo incipient neoliberal goals
associated with financial accumulation and social control.4
In itself, this is an important reason to treat tolerance as
a its own force field, which is defined by a range of
affects and perceptions, which in turn sustain the endurance
of some but not other experiences of pain and objection.
What is more, even in a situation like ours where tolerance
and neoliberalism do seem to overlap, we should be careful
not to reduce one to the other. Not only would such a
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reductionism preclude us from seeing how tolerance works in
places where neoliberalism hasn’t yet taken over, it would
also prevent us from appreciating how some practices of
tolerance draw on neoliberalism in ways that turn the latter
against itself. (I emphasize some—not all—in order to
indicate the ambiguity of tolerance; the point is not to
uncritically embrace all practices of tolerance but to
identify and nourish the ones that support norms of
inclusion and pluralism.) The possibility of such a turning
operation suggests that tolerance is irreducible to external
forces, and that we therefore should insist on approaching
it as a power in its own right.
The reason why new theories of tolerance have paid
little attention to this insight might be a link between the
tendency already identified and then another trend in
contemporary political theory, one that encourages political
theorists to focus on a limited number of examples as
representative of what a tolerant society can do. To counter
this tendency, it is necessary that political theorists
engage in an act of defamiliarization, multiplying the range
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of examples we use to illustrate the link between tolerance
and power. One alternative example could be the group of
three cartoonists who reframed the invitation from the
Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to challenge Islam’s ban on
depicting the Prophet Muhammad and instead used their
cartoons to both ridicule the project itself and to displace
the Christian majority’s anxieties about living in a multi-
religious society. Another example could be a global network
of local grassroots called “Transition Towns,” which aim to
develop resilient communities organized around principles of
permaculture and sustainability. And a third example could
be exchanges such as the recently published one between
Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, which stands out for its
attempts at identifying commonalities between opposing
perspectives and for taking on the other perspective’s
language in order to try out its strengths and weaknesses
(Brown and Forst, 2014, 13, 36, and 34). In all three
examples, tolerance plays an important role, albeit not in
the usual sense of either delimiting or subserving power but
rather in the sense of inhabiting practices of endurance and
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resilience that expand the connections across existing
divides, using many of neoliberalism’s own virtues—be it the
circulation of free speech, principles of economic exchange,
or reasonable debate—in order to create a more inclusive and
pluralistic orientation toward the future. The creativity
embedded in this reorientation may not be representative of
all practices of tolerance but it does help us to see how
tolerance once again can become a positive and active
contribution to norms of inclusion and pluralism.
Let me conclude by noticing that the stakes are high
for new studies, which embark on projects showing how
tolerance can be something other and more than it is today.
As long as tolerance remains a privileged term for thinking
about norms of inclusion and pluralism—something that
doesn’t seem to change any time soon—it is crucial that
political theory gives further attention to those aspects of
tolerance, which may seem tangential to the contemporary
debate but nonetheless can infuse democratic politics with
new energy and inspire citizens of all stripes to expand the
range of acceptable differences in society. In this regard,
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it is important to realize that democracies without a
proactive tolerance sustained by practices of endurance and
resilience may not be democratic at all. Insofar as norms of
inclusion and pluralism augment opportunities for
contestation and disagreements—and insofar as this
augmentation changes the distribution of power and privilege
and in that sense pressures individuals and groups who
already have been included and recognized—democratic
politics itself might be defined by a circularity, which
necessitates a proactive tolerance that remains resilient in
the face of its own imperfection. An important motivation
for switching from an external to an internal perspective,
repositioning our approach to the link between tolerance and
power, has been to highlight this insight and to make it the
focus for new discussions of what a tolerant society can do
when to strives to become nobler and more powerful than it
is today.
Lars Tønder
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School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of
Melbourne, Australia
References
Brown, W. and R. Forst (2014) The Power of Tolerance: A Debate. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, W. (2006) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Forst, R. (2003) Toleration, justice and reason. In The
Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable Tolerance. Edited
by Catriona McKinnon and Dario Castiglione. New York:
Manchester University Press.
--- (2013) Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present. Trans. Ciaran
Cronin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
King, P. (1998) Toleration. New Edition. London: Frank Cass.
Tønder, L. (2013) Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
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Walzer, M. (1999) On Toleration. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Žižek, S. (2008) Tolerance as Ideological Category. Critical
Inquiry, 34 (4): 660 – 682.
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Figure 1: Tolerance and power
Horizontal axis: effects of tolerance.
Vertical axis: tolerance’s relation to power.
Tolerance as governmentali
ty
Tolerance as a demand of
reason
Tolerance as modus
videndiTolerance as self-interest
Repressive
Non-repressive
Serving power
Limiting power
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1 These two dimensions are primarily relevant for the discussion of
the relationship between tolerance and power and are not meant to
exhaust the entire map of theories of tolerance in contemporary
political theory. For an account of the latter, see my discussion in
Tønder (2013, 25–35).
2 For a classical discussion of the tension between these two
components of the concept of tolerance—often referred to as the
“objection” and “acceptance” components—see King (1998, 44–54).
3 Since the emphasis on what the tolerating subject can do entails a
decentering of the subject itself, one cannot say that the
perspective proposed here disregards the lived experiences of the
tolerated or in some other way sees the tolerator as superior to the
tolerated. Such a conclusion is unwarranted as it fails to
acknowledge how the sensorial dimensions on which the power of
tolerance is based arises in between two entities or subjects
undergoing their own processes of becoming. If anything, one might
thus say that the perspective I am proposing here is one that sees
the relationship between the tolerator and the tolerated as a
reversible one, which is to say as a relationship in which the power
of one side of the relationship relies on the power of the other
side.
4 The most obvious example of this might be Diogenes the Cynic who is
said to have appeared naked on the marketplace of Ancient Athens to
show his tolerance while protesting the Athenian culture of
intellectual pretense and financial wealth. For a discussion of this
example and others, see Tønder (2013, 3–4 and 96–101).
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